Justice & Law Quote by Andrew Sullivan

The line lands like a legal brief rewritten as a threat, which is exactly Sullivan's point: rights aren’t abstractions when they can be taken by “strangers.” He’s not describing private prejudice or social discomfort; he’s describing a civic condition in which the state treats your family as contestable property. “You know one thing” has the hard certainty of lived experience, the kind of knowledge you acquire not through ideology but through contingency plans: hospital forms, custody fears, wills you shouldn’t need.

Sullivan’s intent is to shift the debate from morality to vulnerability. By choosing Alabama, he invokes a specific geography of American freedom: a place where “states’ rights” has historically meant the right to exclude. The subtext is that unequal marriage law doesn’t merely withhold a benefit; it manufactures danger. “No standing under the law” is courtroom language, cold and procedural, but he immediately follows it with “violated,” a word that drags the reader from paperwork to bodily harm. The move is rhetorical jujitsu: the law’s neutrality becomes a weapon.

“Strangers” is the quiet killer. It suggests that the intrusion is not just from hostile relatives or conservative clerks, but from anyone empowered by the state’s refusal to recognize your bonds: an ER administrator, a judge, an opposing attorney, a bureaucrat with discretion. Sullivan frames the absence of recognition as an open invitation to interference. The larger context is the pre-Obergefell era’s patchwork of rights, when crossing a state line could collapse a family’s legal identity. His cynicism is restrained, but the message is blunt: when the law won’t see you, it licenses others not to.